


'Til Death Do Us Part

by kitsunerei88



Category: Original Work
Genre: Detective Noir, Drinking to Forget the War, Existentialism, F/M, Film Noir, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Period-Typical Sexism, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:35:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25795231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitsunerei88/pseuds/kitsunerei88
Summary: It isn’t that I don’t know the possible end result. She has left three husbands dead in her wake, including my own father, and yet here I stand with her in front of a priest. By all rights, I more than any other should know the danger. Or, maybe, it is my very proximity that makes me especially susceptible to her charms.
Relationships: Sexy Black Widow Who Has Just Lost Another Husband/Adult Stepson Who Has Always Suspected Her
Comments: 6
Kudos: 15
Collections: Het Swap Exchange 2020





	'Til Death Do Us Part

**Author's Note:**

  * For [badritual](https://archiveofourown.org/users/badritual/gifts).



She is beautiful in the rain. Water droplets glisten in her dark hair, small beads shining brighter than jewels ever could, after only a brief run from the car into this faux-grand chapel. Her long, dark eyelashes have captured a drop or two of their own, and they make the deep blue of her eyes shine. Her dress is black, flouting the expectation of a bride on her wedding day, but I find it fitting.

It isn’t that I don’t know the possible end result. Eva Lake has left three husbands dead in her wake, including my own father, and yet here I stand with her in front of a priest. By all rights, I more than any other should know the danger. Or, maybe, it is my very proximity that makes me especially susceptible to her charms.

But if I have succumbed, it is a very willing downfall indeed. And I wonder if this is how the others felt—how my father felt, how Nigel Blackstone and Ulysses Lake felt, when they stood across from her, with her small hands clasped in theirs.

She is so lovely. A few years may be all we have with her, but those few years will be worth it.

“Do you, John McTavish, take Eva Lake to be your lawfully wedded wife, to have and to hold, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, from this day forward ‘til death do you part?” The priest says, and by the beatific smile on his face, he doesn’t know my wife’s backstory. He has no idea at all.

“I do,” I reply, and my own voice is quiet. Eva smiles, cat-like, a private joke heard only by the two of us in the cavernous, near-empty chapel. The stained-glass windows are dark, the heavy rain pelting the windows the only music to our ceremony.

“And do you, Eva Lake, take John McTavish to be your lawfully wedded husband, to have and to hold, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, from this day forward ‘til death do you part?”

“I do,” she says, and her voice is childish and breathy, hiding a laugh.

And she is mine. It might only be for a few short years, but she is mine, and I think the price well worth the cost.

* * *

I met her first after the war.

My father owned a munitions factory, and she was one of his workers. She was younger then, and she carried with her a childish innocence that rang more genuine then than it does now. Her blue eyes then seemed much larger in her face, waif-like, without a hint of the calculation that I can now see flashing in them from time to time. She was slight, appearing younger than I knew she had to be for my father, a long-time widower, to even consider marrying her. Her very being cried for affection, and she flitted around my father with what seemed to be girlish adoration, if not love.

I could not help but question him about her, but he only smiled at me. “She was in a bit of a spot,” he told me, and I knew from his tone that he did not want me to ask further.

So, I didn’t. After two and a half years in the Pacific Theater, I had other things on my mind. I began working as a private investigator, and in those early days, there were long hours where I thought of little else.

I do not know how genuine of a marriage my father and Eva had. I cannot believe that it was very genuine—my father was an honorable man, and I can hardly imagine him touching a woman close in age to his own son. In any case, I rarely saw her, though I believe she and my father were seen together often in society.

My father passed away in July of 1946. A heart attack, the doctors said—given his age, it was unexpected, but not suspicious. He was by then nearly sixty years of age, and he had lived well, especially in the first boom years between the wars.

I should have suspected from then, but I did not. Or, perhaps I did, and I dismissed it. When I saw her at the funeral, she was weeping openly over the casket, her dark chocolate curls covered in a veil of black lace. Some of the others were muttering—my father had never won popularity with his second marriage, and neither had she within their society—but she ignored them all in her storm of tears. No one dared to question, and I did not think then to look further than what was in front of me: a grieving widow, too young for my father, but my father had always blazed his own path.

Perhaps the only indicator that all was not well was a single flash across her face when the Will was produced and read. My father, a successful businessman who made millions in the economic boom of the 1920s, who weathered the bust of the 1930s, had reviewed the legalities of his situation and redrafted his Will shortly after his marriage. Eva received only a $50,000 cash bequest, while I was named executor and trustee and received the remainder of his not-insignificant fortune. There was shock and disappointment, certainly, but there was also anger, and a slight twisting of her full, pouty lips that was only, for a moment, out of place.

Being upset and disappointed was expected, so I thought little of it. Even the anger was understandable, since Eva was by law my father’s wife. But she caused no fuss over it, or perhaps she did not wish to spend her paltry bequest arguing over it, and she disappeared shortly after.

I did not care. I did not think of her again for many years.

* * *

It was in February of 1950 that I heard of her next. It was late in my office, and I’d already taken out the whiskey. With my father’s fortune, I could have stopped working; indeed, my father likely would have preferred that I did, private investigation being a profession of scorn and disrepute. But the work was all-consuming, an exhausting distraction from the ghosts that still haunted me, so I kept taking files and my father’s wealth only meant that I could enjoy a higher quality of whiskey than I might have done otherwise.

The scent of the Ardmore floated in my nostrils: light notes of honey and vanilla, but with an underlying weight of smoke and earth. The ice cube, huge in the glass, made a clinking sound, and the slight melt of water in the whiskey pulled out the sweet citrus finish on my tongue. I liked the Ardmore—it was better than the 15-year Glenfiddich and Glenlivet both, with a lighter flavor. It would not matter later in the night, but for now, I enjoyed my creature comforts.

Madge, my secretary, had already left for the night with an admonishment for me watch my health. As always, I simply waved her off, telling her to have a good evening with her family. Left to my own devices, in the privacy of my apartment above my office, I reached for the _Chicago Tribune_.

The picture on page four jumped out at me. Eva stared out of the page, and even in black and white I could see the bright blue of her wide eyes. Once again, she wore a black lace veil, and her mouth was turned downwards in recognizable sorrow. The headline below the photograph announced the death of her husband, noted financier Nigel Blackstone in Minneapolis.

It had been just under four years since I had seen her last. Just under four years, and she had already remarried and lost another husband. If I had not been suspicious before, and perhaps I ought to have been, I certainly was now. I leaned forward in my armchair, setting my whiskey aside to read the article.

The prominent Mr. Blackstone had been in his late fifties, just as my late father had been. He, too, had made his wealth in the 1920s, and came out of the 1930s still well off, even as the rest of the market had collapsed. In the new economy after the war, highlighted by the towers now creeping into the skies of every American city, he had already begun to make his mark—until it was cut short by a heart attack, just as my father had suffered. Again, while Mr. Blackstone had been a man in good health, by his age alone a heart attack was not a cause for suspicion.

I reached for my scotch, steely tendrils of something like the weight of obligation creeping over my shoulders. In the war, it was always such—national pride can take a man only so far, and the beaches of Iwojima are it. From there, it is the weight of the men in front of you, the men beside you, the men behind you that drive you forward into the breach.

Iwojima. The sea running dark with blood, shadows of the enemy on the shoreline, the explosive blast of the shells—I threw the rest of my scotch back. It slid, burning and hot, down my throat into my stomach.

The weight of my father hung over me. I would have to go to Minneapolis.

* * *

Minneapolis was thick with snow, crunching under the chains of my tires. American-made steel, of the kind my own father had promoted, while the heater worked overtime to keep the cab warm. The blast of hot air was the only noise in the silence as I crept down the streets to an appropriate hotel.

Mr. Blackstone’s funeral was a prominent affair, for a prominent man. It was no trouble getting into the service, to see Eva again sobbing indecorously over the coffin. Again, no one spoke to her—perhaps, like at my father’s funeral, no one dared.

The second time around, I was not so affected. The tears were genuine enough, but there was something about the weeping that rang mildly false—it was too loud, too sudden, too _performative_. Or, maybe, it was six years of experience as a private eye that told me that however she looked, whatever expression of sorrow she managed to affix on her face, she was a liar.

I lingered after the service, watching. She thanked everyone who came, just as she had at my father’s funeral, but the remarks were brief and perfunctory. There wasn’t a single genuine interaction among a hundred and fifty people, and I could not help but wonder to what extent that was intentional.

“John,” she said, as I approached her—the last in a long line of people, and the only one, I suspected, that was there for _her_ and not for her deceased second husband. Those bright blue eyes widened in surprise for a quick moment, before her face fell back into a soft, sad, grateful smile.

Four years later, she was still young, but she had filled out. Her face was rounder, as were her hips, and she had painted her face to draw attention to those startling blue eyes. Eva was lovely, and as she stood there across from me, the soft hint of red under her eyes, I could tell that she knew it. She was a picture, a painting, and as I examined her the smile dropped away.

“Thank you for coming,” she added, and her voice was still the girlish whisper that I remembered. “I—I didn’t expect you.”

“How could I not?” I asked, inclining my head downwards. Eva is not a tall woman, nearly a full head shorter than me—the better, I later learned, to make her seem defenseless. “When your husband’s death was reported as far away as Chicago.”

She huffed a small laugh. “He was a prominent man.”

“As was my father.” I smiled back at her, and my voice came out lighter, softer than I had intended. “The late Mr. Blackstone was also of a similar age, and a heart attack again, was it?”

“I like older men,” she replied, looking down as if it were a point of shame. I know it was not. “Is that so wrong? And when one likes older men, there are challenges. Health challenges.”

“Neither my father nor Mr. Blackstone were in poor health.” I tucked my hands in my pockets. The air blowing into the funeral home from the doors was icy cold, which had to be the only reason the next words came from my mouth. That, and the fact that her loveliness was undeniable. “Would you care for a drink? My hotel is nearby.”

She tilted her head up at me, and for the first time, I saw the hint of calculation that I would come to see far more later. “A _private_ drink?”

I did not understand what she was asking, then. “No, of course not. There is a bar in the hotel.”

She seemed to think about it for a moment, and then she nodded.

The hotel bar was dark, the scent of liquor seeping through the air. Unlike most of the bars I frequented, I could be sure at least that one was at least clean. The wood of the bar shone warmly under the yellow-tinged lights, and the soft susurrus of conversation formed a soothing backdrop to the tension running in my veins. The bar itself was near empty, most people choosing to sit in the scattered booths and tables, private spots of light in the darkness.

I wanted no privacy, so I headed for the bar and took a seat. She, being shorter than I, struggled to climb into one of the high seats, and I could not help but reach over to lend my arm to her. Dozens of bottles shone under the lights of the bar, and my eyes gravitated towards the dark amber of the whiskeys. Under these lights, I could hardly differentiate the different names, but I spotted a familiar-looking bottle with a golden eagle, wings spread on the label.

“What can I get you?” The bartender came over, wiping his hands on a black towel. The better to hide any stains, I guessed. He was dressed better than any bartender ought to be, in a white collared shirt with dark red tie and waistcoat.

“The Ardmore,” I ordered. “On the rocks. And…”

“Your house red will be fine, thank you,” Eva added, leaning forward at the bar, her voice barely raising above the background whispers.

He nodded, and the drinks appeared in front of us with nothing else said.

I said nothing to her, instead raising the glass of Ardmore to my lips. The scent of honey and vanilla assaulted my nose, sharper than they ever had previously.

Some women, if left in silence, chatter. They feel the need to fill the air with words, and a private eye can learn more from remaining silent than by questioning. Eva did not. Instead, all she did was face forward at the bar, sipping at her glass of wine with cool calm. Her lipstick left a perfectly pressed mark on the wineglass, the imprint of her lips as clear as a kiss.

It was, half a glass of whiskey later, I that broke the silence.

“Your tears at the funeral were fake,” I said. Unusually blunt, but since the war, I have not been known for my delicacy. What purpose does delicacy serve? None at all, as far as I can tell.

“Were they?” Eva asked, her breathy voice hiding a laugh. “And how do you define fake?”

“You aren’t upset about your husband’s death.” My eyes slid over to her, to see that her full lips were turned in a slight smile.

“To the contrary, I am very upset. Nigel and I did not have enough time together.” Even in saying so, though, her expression barely changed. “But when one marries a man in his fifties, one takes certain risks, and I am always aware of them.”

“Or you planned this.” My retort was sharp. “A beautiful young woman, an older, wealthy man, _two_ sudden, unexpected deaths—”

“You think I am beautiful?” She looked at me then, her blue eyes wide. “I am flattered, John.”

“Your wiles are wasted on me, Eva.” I took another long draw from my glass. “Did you kill them?”

Why had I even bothered to ask? I knew that she would have denied it. I suppose, maybe, that I simply wanted to hear that denial, or maybe I wanted to hear _how_ she would deny it. Certainly, I didn’t expect her to admit it, but Eva has always been surprising. Perhaps that was why I was drawn to her.

“Maybe I did,” she said, and her girlish voice had an iron element in it. “But if all you have is your suspicion, John, that will get you preciously little.”

I blinked. One would have thought I would have been horrified by the knowledge of my father’s murder, but all I could really think was _of course._ I was not close to my father—once I had been, but since the war I had spoken to him only a handful of times before his untimely passing. I thought I should have been infuriated, that I should have wanted to seek revenge, but in truth I did not. I cared for my father, but by now his passing was nearly four years ago, and what good would it have done other than my own emotional appeasement?

My father was a smart man, and I still inherited his riches. And I did not care enough about Mr. Blackstone to seek any sort of revenge on his behalf.

Eva watched me, her blue eyes bright and considering, her full lips red and inviting. Her pale skin was warm in the dim lights, her round cheeks rosy, and her dark brown curls were immaculate. Her black dress clung to her figure, emphasizing her round breasts, narrow waist, and full hips. She was not the woman I remembered, but maybe even then she was the woman of my dreams.

Her wine glass held only dregs, now. “Is that everything, John?” she asked, with a hint of a smile. “I’m afraid I really must be going. The house needs to be prepared for sale, and a hundred other things. Thank you for the drink.”

I didn’t have anything else to say to her, and she pushed her empty glass away from her and hopped down from her bar stool. She paused, waiting for me to respond, but when I didn’t, she reached over and rested her hand on my arm.

“I hope to see you again,” she said, and with that, she disappeared.

What was I to do then? I finished my drink, paid, and went back to my room for the night.

Eva Blackstone was a woman in a difficult world. She did not get my father’s wealth, but I knew that the late Mr. Blackstone had no other family, and she would be a wealthy woman once her husband’s estate was settled. What good would it do for me to look further into it? A private eye I might be, but no one would be paying me to make these inquiries. I was no part of the police, and I had no obligation to society as a whole.

Or, rather, whatever obligation I might have had to society, I had already fulfilled in the war. We fought for freedom, and who can say whether we won it?

Pushed by my father’s ghost, however, I did make some inquiries. I had my father’s marriage certificate still, caught in a mess of other documents that I hadn’t let my secretary file. Her maiden name was Eva Baker, and her birth date, to which I had hitherto ignored, showed her to be a few years younger than I. Her childhood was a sad tale—abandoned by her mother at nine, she had floated from home to home until the war started, and then she had taken a job in my father’s munitions factory.

She had sought the security in life that she lacked as a child. Now that she was wealthy, she had no need to do anything of this sort ever again. My father would have wanted me to leave it, so I closed my books and resolved to forget about her.

* * *

The third time I saw her, it was 1953. She called me—a long-distance call from New York City.

“John?” Her breathy voice was instantly recognizable, though it was thick with panic. “It’s Eva—Eva Lake, now. I’m—I’m in trouble, and I know you’re a private eye. Would you come? I’ll pay the expense of the flight to New York City. Please, John.”

I set my drink down to the side, the heavy smoke flavor of the whiskey finish still on my tongue. “Eva. What is it?”

“My husband died,” she said. “And the police—with my history, they suspect me.”

“And why shouldn’t they?” I asked. “Three husbands dead in under ten years, Eva.”

“Because it was a car accident,” she replied, and I straightened in my chair. Eva might have killed before, but she had never done it through a car accident. I could not help but be suspicious, but I was curious nonetheless, and if I were truly honest with myself—

I wanted to go. I wanted to see her. The sound of her pleading must be one of the strongest tools in her arsenal—my own father had said that she was in a spot of trouble when he had married her, and then he had told me to ask no further questions. That note in her voice, combined with a look from those bright blue eyes, framed in long lashes and a pouty mouth, is a strike to the heart.

She was beautiful. She was beautiful, and she needed me.

And I went.

The flight to New York, early in April of 1953, was turbulent. I gritted my teeth in my seat until the stewardess came by to offer me a drink, and I bought out their entire stock of Johnnie Walker and drank it. I would never grow used to planes—almost a decade onwards, they would always bring me back. I hear the electric whine of a plane in the air, and my instinct is to duck, not to enter the great metallic beast’s belly and wait for it to carry me elsewhere.

By the time I staggered off the plane, I was well and truly gone. Eva caught me, I remember, her arms surprisingly strong for someone of her stature, and I woke up in what I now know to have been her apartment in the Upper West Side.

The big, shining city is not a place for me. For all the wealth I inherited for my father, I am a creature of wet alleyways and dimly-lit bars, not for a city where silver towers stretch to scratch the clouds. So, too, I think is Eva—while she might hunt in this new reality, where money clinks from pushed papers, she belongs in an earlier, a grimmer time. She smiles, but underlying her smile is always danger, and not glibness; her dresses might be sweet and modern, but her bearing harkens back to before the war. The world has moved on—new riches, new wealth, even a new war—but we had not.

I remember that she clung to my arm through the police interviews, her soft, warm bulk pressed tightly against my side. I remember that she argued with the police, and that she dropped fat crocodile tears onto their accusations, and I remember needing to explain that I was not her lover, but the son of her first, deceased husband. I remember her sliding into my bed after the first week, her soft, girlish voice begging for my touch, and I remember thinking, _why not?_

She was lovely. She was lovely, and she smelled of honey and vanilla, and her soft gasps under me were pleasure in my ears.

Her husband had been a lawyer, at a white-shoe firm in the heart of Manhattan. He had been younger than my father, younger than Mr. Blackstone, a man on the rise rather than a man with a fortune made. Their apartment was well-appointed, full of luxuries, but there were empty bedrooms in pink and blue, waiting for children to fill them.

His death had been in a car accident, and I remember questioning, wondering if Eva could really have done _this._ Poisoning? Certainly, and that was likely how my father and Mr. Blackstone had gone. But this death was different, and even I, who had reason to suspect more than most, could not believe it had been anything more than an accident. Three long weeks later, and even the police could not find a trace of evidence to connect Eva with her husband’s accident. Neither could I, but I wonder how hard I looked.

“Did you do it?” I asked, long after the investigation was closed, one night in bed while she lay on my chest, her fingers playing in the soft bristles of my chest hair. She had been almost honest with me once, and I thought she would be again—between the two of us, it seems, there are little by way of secrets. “I can’t see how you did. This was not a heart attack.”

“So it wasn’t,” she agreed, tilting her head to look up at me. “But then, three heart attacks would have looked suspicious, and Ulysses was younger.”

I paused, my own hand cupped against her bare hip. “Learning caution, are you?”

“You taught me so.” Her smile was small, but it was cat-like, a small and sweet predator with a new target already in her claws.

“So I did,” I murmured, tugging her upwards in her bed to kiss her. “So I did.”

* * *

The end seems almost inevitable. Eva, a far wealthier woman than I had imagined, followed me home to Chicago. She set herself up in a nice house just out of the city center, conveniently close to my office with my apartment above.

Some nights, in search of more comfort than a bottle of whiskey could ever provide, I went over. She always let me in, always poured me a glass of whatever fine liquor she kept on hand for me, and we fell into bed together. There was little need to talk—Eva never told me why she had done as she did, and I never asked. I think the answer self-evident in any case.

She never asked why I didn’t turn her in, or why I kept coming back to her, even knowing as I did. Perhaps, too, that was self-evident—whatever she had done, she was lovely, and I think I may have loved her from the moment I saw her. She was trouble, honey and vanilla and bitter, and yet I could not imagine staying away.

So here we are today: two screwed-up individuals cleaving to become one screwed-up whole. And I wonder how long I, too, will last.

**Author's Note:**

> outruntheavalanche: Thanks for such a fun prompt to work with, and I hope you enjoyed! In my defence, I've never really tried my hand at noir, but it did seem like a prompt made for the experience, and then I dumped in a whole lot of existentialism and probable PTSD for the narrator. Not that he, a manly man of the immediate post-war period, realizes it.


End file.
